The Dialogue Continues

Christmas Dreams

December 25, 1991

MISANTHROPE -- No silent night, holy night from me. No songs about "The glories of his righteousness, the wonders of his love." This is the year of retrenchment, the Christmas of fears and tears. I gaze in space and imagine clouds heavy with pink slips. I walk the streets and see the growing armies of the dispossessed, huddled on ventilation grates and covered with cardboard. I witness their 5-cent redemptions from the sale of empty bottles and cans. Business is booming in soup kitchens, where customers queue for their daily bread.

PHILANTHROPE -- Don't you see the rising star in the east? Set aside your melancholy and think of Christmas as the birthday of hope for everyone, including the dispossessed. Instead of wailing in despair, consider how much we will share. We may exchange gifts to excess, but we also exchange cards, flowers, smiles, friendship and love. We may not have a truly prayerful day, but we recognize the holy nature of the holiday. We pay homage to peace, which means we keep the ideal of universal brotherhood and sisterhood alive.

MISANTHROPE -- Your soppy pronouncements tire me. You pay homage not to peace but to Santa Claus, the biggest spender in the universe. You make this obese, out-of-shape figure the symbol of your season of tranquility. You make him look like a lovable and huggable patriarch, when in fact he is a slave driver and whip master, whose indentured servants probably suffer from repetitive stress diseases. When you think about it, we all sweat for Santa. Life in December is a fast-motion movie, with all of us running, chasing, straining, pushing and huffing until we reach the valley of twinkling blue spruces for an interlude of self-gratification.

PHILANTHROPE -- But it's a labor of love, stemming not from expectations hammered into us but rooted in an innate desire to please. Our gifts are symbols of affection and concern. You don't have to wrap presents in packages. Just show your friends and loved ones you care, and there will be sunshine. Show them, through words and deeds, that they are important to your world, and they will beam with warm feelings.

MISANTHROPE -- You're being corny again. Around the world, more people are hungry and homeless than a year ago. You hailed the collapse of the Soviet empire, but gave little thought to the next

chapter in East-West relations. You shouted joyfully, "We won!" when the Soviet system collapsed. Yet you showed considerable restraint when Mikhail Gorbachev pleaded for help to feed the people and to avoid the creation of the first nuclear arsenal without a government. You don't much care that Armenians and Azerbaijanis and Croats and Serbs are killing each other.

PHILANTHROPE -- You know that the hands of the nuclear alarm clock have been pushed back considerably. It's no longer only a few minutes before midnight. Of course there is chaos. What do you expect when a superpower collapses, when a totalitarian system falls of its own weight? It's happening in the biggest and most diverse country in the world, a land of more than 100 languages and as many ethnic, racial and religious groups. Don't expect one happy, 300-million-member family to join in a barn-raising. There's considerable pain and anger, but there's also more hope for better days today than at any time since the abolition of serfdom and the collapse of czarist Russia. Don't just focus on the possibility of the rise of a fascist order. Ask how you can help those committed to the ideals enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and in the United States Bill of Rights, whose 200th birthday we observed this month.

MISANTHROPE -- Hope does not enlighten me; facts do. I see misery from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. I see it in East Europe, especially in Yugoslavia, where the first world war of the 20th century began. I see it in China, Burma, Indonesia. Even where there is a measure of freedom, such as in the Philippines, there is widespread deprivation. Black Africa is ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. The land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, once the home of a golden civilization, remains in a dark age under Saddam Hussein. The once magical Persia is a fundamentalist, totalitarian desert. Need I go on?